


i want to be more than this devil inside of me

by pdoesart (elphie_jolras)



Series: they're talking about war on the radio [4]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Amell is professor x, Amell/Loghain is minor too, Anders is Jean Grey (surprise), But it's canon so, Daredevil AU, Gen, Loghain also does not participate in slavery or other unsavory activities, Minor Alistair/Female Warden, Minor Anders/Karl Thekla, Minor Character Death, alistair is magneto (whoops), hawke is a Good Supportive gf, loghain does not die, loghain is not a mutant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-06
Updated: 2016-11-06
Packaged: 2018-08-29 08:29:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8482567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elphie_jolras/pseuds/pdoesart
Summary: Anders is twelve when he starts hearing the voices.
- OR - 
A sort of character study for Anders in this AU





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from "Dear Wormwood" by the Oh Hellos. If you haven't listened to any of their music, I highly recommend it!

**i.**

Anders is twelve when he starts hearing the voices.

It only takes him a few days to realize that the voices aren’t in _his_ head, that they’re coming from the heads of those around him.  He learns, painstakingly, to block them out, to ignore every voice that assaults his mind.

He’s thirteen when he starts moving objects with his mind.

His mother is forgiving, supportive.

His father is less so.

He is thirteen and he has a name, a _real_ name, not the nickname that has come to mean more to him over the years.  But his father stops using it, starts calling him _boy_ and _freak_ and other cruel words, until men in dark suits come to their door and take Anders away, take him to a place called _the Institute_ where they say they’ll teach him to use his powers.

They don’t; they make him do tests and push him to his limits.  When he gets frustrated and enraged at yet another test, things start flying around and they have to tranquilize him and lock him up.

\--

Anders is eighteen when he escapes the Institute.

He doesn’t know where he’s going, not really, but he has to _get out_ and he does, he’s free, and he’s found by a woman only a few years older than him, a woman who speaks in his brain and says that she can help him.  At first he doesn’t trust her, because he’s been hurt before by people who promised to _help_ , but Elodie Amell shows him her mind and he sees a school, sees children with powers _learning_ in an environment meant to nourish and not examine.

_I’ll not make you come with me,_ she tells him silently, _I’m not them.  This is your choice.  You can leave whenever you wish._

Elodie Amell is beautiful, willowy and bright-eyed, and she understands him.  He’s never known someone like that before.

So he goes.

**ii.**

Anders is nineteen when he finds out why Elodie is confined to a wheelchair. 

Alistair, her friend and lover, the man she’d once wanted to marry, had turned his back on her _and_ on humankind, instead forming a brotherhood of powered people.  Mutants.  Humans call him _Magneto_ in hushed tones, fearing the way he controls metal.  Elodie always shakes her head sadly when he appears on the news, shaky video footage of a mutant rally with him heatedly speaking his views to crowds that cheer in all the right places.

“And to think he said he wasn’t cut out for leadership,” she’d murmur, something almost _bitter_ in her soft tone.

He learns that they parted ways on a beach in Cuba, that Alistair had finally tracked down the man who had abandoned his half-brother on a battlefield and Elodie spared him instead of killing him ( _“Trying to save Cailin would have killed the rest of his men,”_ Elodie tells him when he asks her; _“Retreating was the right choice”_ ).

“The bullet was an accident,” Elodie says.  “He threatened to kill Loghain himself; Leliana started firing at him.  Of course, attacking a man who controls metal with metal bullets was a bit… _misguided_ , but it wasn’t anybody’s fault.  Alistair never meant for the ricocheted bullet to hit me; it just happened to.”

“So you _forgave him_?”

Elodie smiles kindly.  “Forgiveness is always a path to consider.  Just because someone stumbles and falls doesn’t mean that they’re lost forever.”

\--

Anders is twenty-one when he first battles Magneto.

It’s the first time he’s been in a battle, period, mostly because the professor – Elodie – says he hasn’t unlocked his power all of the way.  His telepathy is pretty useless against Magneto himself, since the professor’s ex wears a special helmet designed to keep telepaths out of his head, but he still has his telekinesis.  He can still fight with his telekinesis.

That’s the day he finds out what happens when his full power _is_ unlocked.

Turns out he glows.  Everywhere.  His eyes and skin crackle with blue light, or so Zevran tells him after the battle is done and he finds himself being carried by the much shorter man – _bridal_ style, too, which is incredibly awkward and slightly humiliating.

“You kept yelling about justice,” says Nate as Wynne heals the two of them.  “And you wouldn’t listen to any of us.”

They tell Elodie and she determines that he’s being inhabited by some sort of being; she names it Justice and vows to help Anders control it.  But it doesn’t seem that Justice likes to be controlled, and Anders never manages to become aware of what happens when he turns blue.

The final straw comes when Justice hurts one of his teammates; Anders runs away that very night.

**iii.**

Medical school comes easily to him – it feels nice to heal people.  It reminds him of Wynne, lovely Wynne with her kind smiles and gentle eyes; Wynne, who could be stern and inflexible as a steel rod when she had to be.

He sends letters to the professor, occasionally; he doesn’t give a return address and so he doesn’t know if they actually reach her, but he doesn’t want to reach out for fear that she’ll ask him to return.   She’d never _force_ him, of course, but that means little.  He knows that if she asks him, he’ll go back.  He wouldn’t be able to say no.

(He _wants_ to go back, he does, but he can’t run the risk of hurting anybody else.  Justice is dangerous, and the only way to stop it from hurting people is to not let it out.)

It’s a few years after med school when he meets Karl.  Karl is the first person he’s loved since his mother and father gave him up, and Anders loves him _fully_.  He’s a mutant, too; he can phase through almost any surface, walking through walls as if they were nothing but air.  Anders is amazed, and says as much between the kisses he peppers Karl’s face with.  He loves Karl almost as much as he loves the clinic in Hell’s Kitchen, the place where he can help people who can’t pay for a hospital.  With every life he saves, he feels a little more in control, a little more like Justice is contained.

“You’re a hero, Mr. Anders,” says a little girl whose arm he’s just set in a cast.  He can’t help the proud smile that spreads across his face at the words; he’s a _hero_.  He doesn’t need to use his abilities to help people, doesn’t need to look in people’s heads or move things with his mind to save lives.  He doesn’t need to use his abilities at all.

\--

He doesn’t want to say that his world falls apart when Karl becomes brain dead, but that’s what happens.

It feels foolish, afterward, believing that people like them could be happy.  Logically he knows that Karl wasn’t attacked based on being a mutant – that he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time – but Anders has never been one for logic.  He stops eating regularly, forgets to sleep, feels his control start to slip.  He accidentally reads thoughts; he accidentally levitates his coffee cup.  He starts waiting for the slip-up that will kill him, the day he ends up in the same position as Karl.

He’s not in a good place, not for a long time.  He’s not about to abandon the clinic, not with patients who need him, but it’s getting harder and harder to care about his own health.

And then he finds Marian Hawke in his dumpster.

Looking back, it seems more and more like an act of God towards the both of them, because Marian and her countless vigilante fellows give him even more of a purpose in his life.  Marian especially.  She’s beautiful, and compassionate, with just the right amount of the devil in her.  She protects her own, no matter the cost to herself.

She reminds him of the professor in that way.

**iv.**

He’s thirty-five when Marian discovers his powers.

In his defense, he’d meant to tell her at some point; he just hadn’t gotten to it. 

He gets cornered by some gang member wielding a heavy pipe, and maybe a few months ago he would have simply let this asshole bludgeon him but not anymore.  He has to get home for Marian’s sake.  Marian has lost enough.

_He_ has lost enough.  He’s not about to lose his life as well.

He presses two fingers to his temple, a focusing gesture that the professor taught him ages ago, and looks the thug in the eye.  “You want to drop that pipe.”

Nate used to call it a _Jedi mind trick_ , he remembers as his would-be attacker simply drops his weapon.  Only problem with that analogy is that Anders’ telepathy works on pretty much everybody, not just the weak-willed.

It doesn’t work when he’s surprised, though, as he finds out when another assailant appears out of the shadows with a particularly wicked looking knife.  _This_ time, Anders doesn’t have a chance to influence the thug before he’s under attack; he lets out a yell of surprise and barely dodges the knife.

It’s honestly a small miracle that Marian gets there, even if she only gets there in time to watch a metal pipe fly _off of the ground_ and into his hand, where he promptly bashes the thug over the head with it.

“Holy shit,” says Marian, who swears using the word _holy_ a lot, considering she’s a devout Catholic, “You have _powers_?  You have _telekinesis_?”

\--

In the end, Marian takes the whole _my boyfriend has powers_ thing rather well.

He explains it all, from the beginning: his parents, the Institute, Elodie Amell and her wheelchair, Justice and the way it takes over if he isn’t careful with his powers.  _Karl._ Why he became a doctor instead of a vigilante.

“I couldn’t be sure I wouldn’t hurt the people I meant to protect,” he tells her softly.  She leans her forehead against his, hands caressing his cheeks, blue eyes gentle as she simply _gazes_ at him.

“You’re doing what you can, Anders.  You shouldn’t be…” she takes in a deep, shuddering breath, and that’s when he sees the tears in her eyes.  His heart _wrenches_ , because he doesn’t want to see Marian in pain.  _Ever_.  “You shouldn’t feel ashamed because you aren’t out there fighting gang members.  You’re healing the people they hurt – that’s something better than the rest of us do.  At least you aren’t resorting to violence.”

There’s a catch in her voice in her last sentence, and something tells him it isn’t just her fear of the sin of wrath.  “Mare?”

Her eyes slide closed, lip quivering, hands shaking on his face.  He brings up his own to cover them, and she speaks.

“My father taught me to fight.  But he also taught me never to _start_ a fight.  Never to throw the first punch.  I promised him I would take his lesson to heart, that I would only _end_ the fights, not start them, but now… I – I almost feel like I’m breaking that promise.  I try to tell myself that they started the fight when they committed their crimes, but it feels like a weaker and weaker excuse with each passing day.”  She shakes her head.  “I feel like I’m failing him.”

“Mare, look at me.”

Marian opens her eyes, and he moves his hands to wipe away the crystalline tears that fall from her eyes.  He’s almost certain that he has tears in his own eyes, but he ignores them.  The woman he loves needs him, beautiful and strong and terrifying though she is.  He cracks a smile at her, knowing that nothing gets through to her quite like an attempt at humor.

“You know what I think?  I think that if a _priest_ can start fights with these sons of bitches, then you’ll be fine.”

The laugh he gets in response is a little watery, but it’s a laugh nonetheless.

**v.**

Anders is almost thirty-six when he walks back through the doors of the Amell manor.

It’s been half a decade since he walked these halls, and he never did it with the woman at his side now.

Not much has changed, surprisingly; same oak paneling, same kids running from class to class, same comforting aura that he’s never sure if he’s imagining or not.

“It’s so… _peaceful_ , here,” Marian says to him as they head towards the professor’s office, “Not in the quiet way, but in the way that… it feels like coming home.”

He’s not imagining it, then.

He knocks on the door to the professor’s office and she invites them to come in; the familiar voice sends chills up his spine and leaves a lump in his throat.  Mare squeezes his hand and smiles at him – he’s suddenly very glad that he brought her.  Just having her at his side is enough.

He opens the door, and he sees the shock on Elodie Amell’s face fade quickly into a delighted smile.

“Anders!”

She has a new wheelchair, considerably faster and more rugged than the last, and it only takes her a bit longer to get to him than she might’ve if she’d had use of her legs.  He stoops to hug her and let himself be hugged, inhaling the scent of her jasmine perfume.

“Hi, Professor Amell.”

“Amell?”

Marian seems a little shocked at the name; Anders stands back up and looks at her quizzically.  Mare furrows her brow and looks at Elodie, finally asking: “Any relation to Leandra Amell?”

_Leandra?_ Mare’s _mom_?  But –

Elodie claps her hands in delight.  “My mother was the middle child of three!  Her siblings were her younger sister, Leandra, and her older brother –”

“Gamlen!”  Marian looks _incredibly_ excited.  “I had no idea I had any cousins!”

“Nor I!”  Elodie looks immensely pleased.  “It’s a pleasure – Most of my friends call me Elodie.”

“Marian.”

The cousins shake hands, and the glint of something on the professor’s finger catches Anders’ eye.  He peers at her pale hand and is shocked to find an _engagement_ ring there.

“You’re engaged?  To who?”

Elodie looks a bit abashed, which has never been a good sign.  Elodie does not do _abashed_ unless she has committed some sort of social faux pas.

“Loghain Mac Tir.”

Like _marrying the man who made Alistair break up with her in the first place._

Anders makes a noise that sounds remarkably like a cat coughing up a fur ball – or so Mare will tell him later.  At the time, he’s mostly preoccupied with the fact that _Elodie_ and _Loghain_ are engaged.  He would have never guessed that; something between them must have changed after he left.  It wasn’t that he’d disliked Loghain – the man was a bit stoic and prickly, but possessed a decent sense of humor and was good in a fight.  Rather, he’d assumed that Elodie would never truly get over Magneto.

“You’re marrying _him_?  The _ex-soldier_?”

He doesn’t quite know why he puts such an emphasis on Loghain’s past; he isn’t all that strange, honestly.  Much less strange than a being residing inside your body and possessing you if you got a bit too upset.  Elodie gives him a bemused look, and he remembers that this is the _professor_ he’s talked to.  “Sorry,” he says eventually.

“You’re invited to the wedding,” Elodie says, which is her version of _no harm done, you’re forgiven._

Anders smiles, and Mare smiles as well.

It’s always nice to reunite with family.


End file.
